Are You Stuck Between Being and Becoming?

by Jayaram V

Many people feel stuck in their lives. It is as if the tires of their lives are buried deep in the mire of stagnation. They may also feel the same when they are making progress, if their progress is slower than what they expected. Some people pack a lot of ambition in their minds and want to translate it into reality. They feel frustrated if their plans do not work or if they find obstacles and problems that prevent them from reaching their goals.

Being and becoming are the two states between which people spend their whole lives. For maximum satisfaction in your life you must be comfortable with both states. For that you must accept who you are, and you must be clear about what you want to achieve in your life. Sometimes you may believe that you are stuck between where you are and where you want to go. It may happen for various reasons, and when it happens, you must learn to perceive the reality of your situation and take appropriate measures. You must learn to be happy with both states of being and becoming. Then peace will be your friend for the rest of your journey, not someone you will meet at the destination.

Some people are chronically dissatisfied. Nothing makes them happy because they are overambitious and set their goals high. Sometimes you may feel stuck because of faulty thinking or if you are excessively preoccupied with a particular aspect of your life. If your vision is limited by your interests or choices, it is more likely that you may frequently suffer from stress and bouts of despair. If you are chronically feeling stuck, ask yourself whether it is a problem of your perception or reality. Truly speaking, you have no other place to go except between who you are and what you want to be. If you think you are stressed by the uncertainties of life, you are probably not envisioning your life as a moving phenomenon or a series of events, achievements, becomings and beings. It is true. Your life is never the same or static. You travel from point to point, from one state of existence to another, and from one achievement or failure to another. Your journey never ends, even if you do not act, until it finally ends.

It is what life is, a moving phenomenon. There is only one full stop to it. In between there can be as many commas, semicolons, dashes, and so on. They are just pauses in a long journey that cannot be reversed or rolled back. In the map of your life, you can move from point A to point B, but you will not rest there forever. Then point B becomes point A, and you to look for a new point B to move farther. Thus, even when you are making progress, you are anyway stuck between any two points of your life depending upon how far or how deep you look at it. From the highest perspective, you are also stuck between the point A of your birth and the point B of your death. Thus, on the canvas of life it is better to be stuck in a moving brush stroke rather becoming part of a dot, because it means you are alive and you still have chances and opportunities to make your journey a better, happier and adventurous experience.

Imagination is our greatest gift. Yet it can be source of great despair. Imaginative people, by nature are more melancholic. They may be good artists, write good poetry, compose great songs, or set great tunes, but somewhere in their minds they remain deeply dissatisfied with their lives and with their achievements, partly because humanity cannot easily understand them or truly appreciate them and partly because they cannot adjust to the expectations of the people who become their admirers or their critics. If you belong to this category, know that you will feel stuck anyway.

If you observe human behavior, a few things become apparent.

1. The happiness that you experience from achieving anything or reaching any goal does not last long. It will also not be as intense as you thought it would be.

2. You tend to compare yourself with people who are better than you rather those who are equal to you or less than equal to you. They become your measure of success, and their achievement becomes your threshold for happiness. Thereby you are doomed forever to be unhappy and unfulfilled.

3. You desire things not only to satisfy your needs but also to address your fears and insecurity. Since there is no end to your fear, you are seldom comforted by your achievements and successes.

The truth is you are always what you are now. You are not and you cannot be what you want to be or what you will be. You must know this distinction to remain clear headed. Your current moment is the reality. Your future expectation is just a thought, desire, wish, or dream. The distinction will remain as long as you exist. Being is now and what you desire to become is in future. These two are the two ends of a long transformative process. When you become what you want to become, you do not stop there. In fact, you are not programmed to stop there. You set up a new expectation, or a new goal, which again creates the gap between who you are and what you want to become. Thus, at any given time in your life, mentally you are always in the twilight zone of your current reality and future expectations, while physically you are always in the current reality, the state of being.

Your state of being is the only thing that you can be sure about. Even it may elude you if you set your vision high on the far horizon. Your present state is a culmination of what you strived for before. It is what you had been waiting for, before you reached You are always in a transformative process, because it is the nature of life and the nature of our existence. We live in an impermanent world. Therefore, you cannot be free from change or remain stuck. May be it is not the change you want to happen, but it is a change that happens to you. If you are feeling stuck in the journey of your life, it is because you are not letting your current reality touch your life or your mind. You are not willing to acknowledge it or accept it. It implies that you are in denial, and preoccupied with the idea of becoming rather than with the reality of being.

Your present condition or your current state of being is always incomplete for you because you are a work in progress. You are always in a state of becoming, but you cannot measure it accurately. In the journey of your life you will make a series of progresses from one point to another. Sometimes you may not see the interconnection, and sometimes what you consider failure may be success from a different perspective. Thus, even your current reality may not fully reveal the mysteries of life. A lot of meaning and purpose in life remains hidden from your visible field. Therefore, sometimes being stuck may be a better option.

There is no limit to what you can become or want to become. However, eventually everything about you has to come to an end. It may be delayed, but it cannot be stopped. It is the state beyond being and becoming. It is called the state of nonbeing. In that state nothing matters. Therefore, it may be better to remain stuck between being and becoming, and between birth and death, rather than reaching the final end, the full stop.

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